This is a general outline of the events of Operation: DIRECT SPEAR, the GOTY 2014 winning ArmA2 expansion that has been ported to ArmA3... and beyond.

Operation: DIRECT SPEAR centers around Prestige Worldwide, a multi-national organization with interests in the mining, private security, timber cutting, logistics, and pornography industries, nominally based in the Maldives. Prestige Worldwide is staffed by a constantly-changing group of mercenaries of various nationalities.

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Operation: Direct Spear (GOTY 2012) - ArmA 2: Combined Operations

The critically-acclaimed first installment of Operation: Direct Spear was released as a multiplayer cooperative campaign for Bohemia Interactive's Arma 2: Combined Operations. Pitting the twenty human players against a range of African-inspired enemies (ranging from tribesmen, to local militias, to the United Nations), Operation Direct Spear follows Prestige Worldwide on its hunt to assassinate the villainous Major Tambossa, a corrupt and ruthless warlord ruling northern Isla Duala with an iron fist from his compound in Bolabongo. Tambossa's faction, the vicious UFLL (United Front for Liberation and Labor) was responsible for widespread raping and looting and had completely destabilized the island. Prestige Worldwide was brought in to clean up the mess, after the United Nations had (predictably) failed.

Setting up camp in the southwest of the country, Prestige Worldwide immediately began flying missions in its Mi-24 Hind gunship, and undertook several parachute insertions far behind enemy lines, carrying out clandestine (and highly sensitive) operations to wear down the UFLL. The operatives were generally met with success against the ill-trained locals who had largely been dragooned into service with the UFLL, and enemy casualties were high.

The missions were not without mishaps, however. In one now-famous incident, Prestige Worldwide pilot Kat T. Tsun was involved in a midair collision with another Prestige Worldwide helicopter, resulting in both vehicles being destroyed. His last radio transmission, "I'm a good pilot!", was thus inscribed on the memoriam wall at Mike's Bar, and led to the creation of the Rules For Piloting A Rotary Vehicle, which were not met with much enthusiasm.

On another occasion, several Prestige Worldwide operators had mounted up in one of the organization's captured BTR armored amphibious vehicles, and was driving out of Mike's Bar to support a thrust to destroy some parked enemy helicopters. Unfortunately the road bend right before the Cainna bridge is quite treacherous, and the armored vehicle overturned, killing its occupants. This stretch of road was later branded "Dead Man's Curve", and marked as such on all Prestige Worldwide maps of the area.

Despite its mishaps, Prestige Worldwide did succeed in its mission to drive the UFLL out of the country, and after some time, the Intelligence Division was able to track Tambossa to a location near his mansion northwest of Bolabongo. Prestige Worldwide's "Red Section" ventured to the plotted ambush point, and in a fabulous show of marksmanship, scored a kill on (what was thought to be) Major Tambossa. The 900 meter shot, scored with a Barrett .50-caliber rifle, set a new record for the company. For good measure, "Goulash Leader" (the callsign for the company's Mi-24 Hind gunship) leveled the compound with a barrage of rockets and two fuel-air bombs, just to be sure, damn them.

All was not quiet for long. Soon rumors began to circulate that Tambossa had escaped, and it was implied that the famous shot made by Lt. Carbonell had hit a double, and not Tambossa himself.

The task of finding Tambossa fell, as usual, to the Intelligence Division. Dispatching its best deep-cover operative to Hong Kong, Prestige Worldwide soon ascertained that Tambossa had escaped. During a lengthy COINTELPRO session in a Chinese brothel, Lt. Anto Kankaras discovered that Tambossa had fled to Tanoa, a small Pacific island which (coincidentally, and not a little conveniently) was home to a large Belgian mining interest, Union Miniere.

Upon discovery of Tambossa's whereabouts, Prestige Worldwide immediately set up a new Mike's Bar in Tanoa. Tambossa had already established his own personal fiefdom, turning the local Gendarmerie against the people, and a healthy civil war had broken out in which the government of Tanoa had requested assistance from the United Nations. A small peacekeeping force had been sent to the islands, which only slightly curtailed Tambossa's activities.

Intercepted emails led to the revelation that Tambossa had captured the Mle 1 Générateur de tremblements de terre, the "Earthquake Generator" - a device invented by Union Miniere to move large quantities of rock at once. The emails revealed that Tambossa had reverse-engineered the device, and planned to use it to blackmail governments into paying him substantial ransom fees in order to prevent its use. Prestige Worldwide immediately set out to find the Earthquake Generator, and kill Tambossa once and for all.

Goulash Squadron, newly arrived from Isla Duala, went to work flying CAS missions over the islands, and Tambossa's forces were whittled down in a series of actions that slowly sapped his strength throughout Tanoa. He, along with a team of covert Chinese operatives, was cornered to his hideout at the summit of the great volcano, and Prestige Worldwide fought a close-quarters action that ended nearly 14 miles underground at the bottom of a mine shaft, where the Earthquake Generator had been stored.

Bursting into the final room containing the device, the Prestige Worldwide entry team (armed primarily with Cool AKs) encountered Tambossa, with a revolver pointed to his head and his thumb on a dead man's switch. "Come no closer, or I'll activate the device!" he shouted, his gold-plated Python .454 Casull pressed to his temple, his face screwed into an angry snarl, and his thumb shakily hovering above the switch. "Stay back!" he shouted again, as the Prestige Worldwide operators slowly advanced.

He looked resignedly at them, before muttering, "you make your own doom!" With a great flourish, he closed his thumb on the device's trigger, but nothing happened. Looking around in bewilderment, he dropped his revolver, and in an instant Francois Terreblanche was on him, throwing him to the ground and calling him scum. In a confused shuffle, Tambossa managed to escape, crawling backwards on his haunches and getting closer and closer to the device, which had begun to activate.

Suddenly, the enormous device began to shudder and emit beams of light, and in an instant Tambossa (and it) were gone, accompanied by a crack and a flash of blinding light. The device immediately reappeared, with its small console blinking a series of digits...

10 / 10 / 1944

The small panel under it read: "DEPRESS TRIGGER ONCE TO JUMP TO SPECIFIED DATE..."

Operation: Direct Spear 3 - Tears of Valor (World War II Tanoa) - GOTY 2017Prestige Worldwide travels back in time via the Earthquake Generator / Temporal Inversion Device to encounter and battle Tambossa on Tanoa in 1944, with the assistance of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

Operation: Direct Spear 4 - Titan's Damnation (Altis) - GOTY 2018Having escaped Tanoa by inches (by commandeering the U.S. Navy destroyer escort ELDRIDGE (DE-173) and its cloaking device / time travel machine), Tambossa again sets up shop on Altis in the Aegean Sea, in search of Union Miniere's second Earthquake Generator device. He discovers and captures it, and learns of its remarkable power: while the Tanoan Earthquake Generator was a time-travel device, the Altian Earthquake Generator creates atomic-level duplicates of whatever is set on its pad. Prestige Worldwide arrives just in time to stop him, but not before he duplicates himself twice.

The duplication device, originally intended as a method for Union Miniere to duplicate solid gold ingots, does not have the ability to reliably duplicate the memories and personality of the target, and only one of the duplicated Tambossas retains his original evil persona. The second duplicate is created as an innocent man, with no presumption to evil. The original Tambossa, as would be expected, escapes, and the evil duplicate is killed on the duplication pad. "Good" Tambossa joins Prestige Worldwide immediately.